Including your own employees, Kennedy thought. Because conspicuous cameras would do both things — deter criminals and catch transgressions. What they wouldn’t do was regulate the behaviour of people who worked with the collection on a day-to-day basis. This was a system that forestalled unpleasant surprises by treating everyone as the enemy.
What Rush never bothered to mention in the midst of all of these technological wonders was the collection itself; but as they moved from room to room, Kennedy couldn’t keep her gaze from wandering, drawn by massive sculptures, Native American totem poles, bark canoes, suits of armour. The smaller items, as she’d expected, were safely stored in packing cases that lined the walls of the rooms or were neatly stacked in miles of grey-steel shelving. The big, uncompromising things were sitting right out in the open.
Room 37 was one of the least remarkable in this respect. It was full of shelf units and boxes and nothing else. They glanced inside but didn’t go in, because Kennedy wasn’t ready to focus in on it yet. She wanted to get a decent overview of the place first.
‘Our environmental control is also state-of-the-art,’ Gassan said, as they walked on. ‘Temperature, humidity, light — they’re all regulated and monitored in real time.’
‘What are these?’ Kennedy asked. She pointed to a grey box on the wall, right next to the more familiar red box that was the fire alarm. It was identical in size and shape, but was labelled SECURITY where the other was labelled FIRE. Like the fire alarm, it had a rectangular glass insert, bearing the words PRESS HERE.
‘That’s another security feature,’ Gassan said. ‘Installed by my predecessor, Dr Leopold. Breaking the glass or pressing the button triggers a lockdown. All internal doors are deactivated. External doors and windows lock, and security shutters are lowered. It turns the building into a jailhouse, essentially.’
Rush was standing several yards further on, holding a door open for them. He fell in next to Kennedy, after Gassan had gone through. ‘Not all that much use,’ he told her, in a confidential murmur.
She looked at him. ‘How come?’
‘Well, it’s manually operated, for starters. It’s not tied to the movement sensors or the cameras. There’s no automatic triggering.’
Sotto voce or not, Professor Gassan had overheard them. ‘Because of the risk of injury to an intruder,’ he said, giving Rush a look of schoolmasterly disapproval before he turned his attention back to Kennedy. ‘We have legal and ethical responsibilities.’
‘The alarm is linked to a local police station, sir,’ Rush pointed out. ‘And the average response time is twelve minutes.’
‘The liability would still be ours,’ said Gassan.
Rush walked on ahead again. He knew when he was beaten.
He rounded off the tour by taking them up onto the roof. He pointed out the pressure and movement alarms, CCTV rigs and the grid of outward-tilted razor wire around the whole roofspace to a height of five feet.
‘This is all new,’ Rush told Kennedy. ‘We used to be pretty vulnerable up here. Now we’re …’ He hesitated.
‘State-of-the-art?’ she hazarded.
‘Yeah, really. It’s pretty amazing.’
Kennedy took a little wander, looking for any points of entry. There were air-conditioning ducts big enough to take a human body, but their mouths were covered by heavy metal grilles, riveted into place, and there was no sign that any of them had been touched. The door by which they’d accessed the roof was plate steel, with a combination lock, a key lock and three padlock-secured bolts. There wasn’t even a handle on this side.
The two men were waiting patiently for her to complete her inspection. Kennedy walked to the edge of the roof, scanned the ground below and the approaches. The building had no near neighbours. It stood on its own ground, with at least six feet of clearance on all sides. No trees or telegraph poles or lamp stanchions for an intruder to shinny up. Drainpipes, obviously, but at intervals along their length Kennedy could see the spiky crowns of anti-climb brackets. She could also see the cameras swivelling back and forth on their mounts, quartering the landscape below them.
She went back to Rush and Gassan. ‘You didn’t catch anything on these, I assume?’ she said, pointing at the cameras.
‘From the night of the break-in, you mean?’ Rush shook his head. ‘No. We went through all the outside footage, right from when we locked the doors the night before. Nothing. Not a dicky bird.’
‘Okay,’ Kennedy said. ‘I’m done up here. Thanks for waiting.’
‘So did you figure anything out yet?’ Rush asked her, almost shyly.
His faith in the detective’s art was touching. ‘Not yet,’ Kennedy said. ‘But I’d like to see the CCTV footage from Room 37 — the segment where your intruder shows up on camera. And then I’d like to go back in and take a proper look at the room itself.’
They went to the surveillance room, which was about the size of a broom closet. Rush opened up a locked steel cupboard and selected a disc from a hundred or so that were racked there.
There was only one seat, which Gassan insisted Kennedy take, even though this meant Rush having to squat to operate the DVD playback. He slid the disc into a reader that was a blank steel slab without controls, opened up an interface window on the computer right next to it and typed in a time signature. A second window popped open on the screen: the camera playback, delivered in an area about the size of a credit card.
As the image resolved, Kennedy found herself looking at a space that could have been any one of the dozens of rooms she’d just walked through.
‘Room 37,’ Rush said, with just a hint of melodrama. ‘Night of Monday the twenty-fourth.’
The point of view was from up near the ceiling. A shelving unit bisected the field of vision, so that they were looking down two parallel aisles. Everything was so still, the image might have been a freeze-frame except for the numbers of the time stamp cycling at top left.
‘Can you make this any bigger?’ Kennedy asked.
Rush fiddled with drop-down menus, but nothing happened. ‘Sorry. I don’t know the system that well.’
A figure came abruptly into view. Dressed from head to foot in black, with a black balaclava, it was the stereotype special ops agent of popular fiction. The eerie incongruity raised a slight prickle on Kennedy’s scalp. Despite what Gassan had said earlier, it was impossible to tell whether she was looking at a man or a woman — although whoever it was must be young and strong. The figure scaled the shelf unit as though it were a ladder, pushed at something that was off-screen and then hauled itself through, out of sight.
The whole sequence covered no more than twenty seconds.
Rush rewound to the moment when the figure disappeared off the top of the screen, and froze the image.
‘Ceiling panel,’ he said, tapping the monitor. ‘He went up into the drop ceiling.’
‘And then?’
‘No idea. We looked up there, but there was nothing, no trace of him.’
‘And has anyone been allowed into the room since the break-in?’ Kennedy asked.
‘Well, we went in. The security team, I mean. Right after we saw the camera footage. Then the police came and made a search of the room. And while the police were still here, some clericals did a count to see if anything was missing — but that was under police supervision. Since then the room has been permanently off-limits.’